In one of his final works, Inventions of a Present (2024), Fredric Jameson suggests that it is not the critic “but reality itself [that] is Marxist in its structure.” Reading this alongside his earlier theorization that capital has fully colonized both nature and the unconscious in the contemporary world, one might ask whether such statements warrant mere attention to the surface—as some of Jameson’s critics have long maintained. To be sure, Jameson is careful to add that this rising Marxist structure of reality commits the critic to “approximate that reality and to come to active terms with it” in a way that “cannot stop short of history itself.” Sanguine though he may have been, the implications of the statement, and what it urges the critic to perform, are far from straightforward.

One observes different iterations of contemporary Marxism—both aligned with and diverging from Jameson—to have variously: forged links between cultural and literary abstraction and the real abstractions of the value-form; asserted that art and the aesthetic remain autonomous of their conditions of emergence; posited that certain literary genres or political stances can by fiat totalize the heterogeneous complexities of global capitalism; and sought to re-politicize purportedly nonpolitical realms of experience, such as emotion, feeling, and affect.

The compounding frameworks notwithstanding, the enduring appeal of the Marxist analytic is surely that not stopping short of history, as Jameson puts it, has also meant not stopping short of urging that socio-political transformation remain the horizon of critical thought. While in Jameson’s work the engagement with radical politics often crystallizes in an insistence on a work’s “utopian” impulse, which he contended it necessarily contains, his late claim that “reality is itself Marxist” offers a fresh opportunity to deliberate whether it remains useful—or even possible—to distinguish between thinking about capitalism and thinking beyond capitalism.

Keeping Jameson’s provocative assertion in mind, this seminar invites engagements with the legacy of cultural Marxism writ large. Some questions with which we shall contend include: what are the hermeneutic valences of reading literary texts through such Marxist categories as class/struggle, primitive accumulation, value, etc.? What kinds of recalibrations of analysis are required to produce what Jameson calls “political readings” of texts? We welcome proposals that broadly engage:

-Legacies of Marxist theorists and/or schools of Marxist thought.

-Politics and Aesthetics

-Literature and Utopia

-The politics of the value-form

-Capitalist Form

-Real Abstraction

-Collectivity and Art

-Culture and Contradiction